User:Goclenius/Descartes' Life

Jan Weenix, Portrait of Descartes (1649, Centraalmuseum, Utrecht). On the book Descartes holds are the words Mundus est fabula (“The world is a fable”). One of two authentic portraits. The better-known “Hals Portrait” is neither by Frans Hals nor of Descartes.

This article is part of the Descartes series.ªªª

Background: 1596

Note. The abbreviation ‘AT’ stands for Adam and Tannery’s standard edition of Descartes’ works.

At the end of the seventeenth century, France was recovering from a bloody series of civil wars, politically and religiously motivated, that had finally come to an end—temporarily, as it turned out—with the Edict of Nantes issued by Henry IV in 1598. In the sciences, meanwhile, first Copernicus and then Kepler had overturned ancient theories of the motions of the planets; Galileo was embarking on the discoveries in physics and astronomy that would place him with Descartes among the founders of the new science. The Jesuits, founded in 1540, were putting the teaching of Aristotle’s philosophy, which though increasingly in dispute was still the basis of the university curriculum, on a sound basis, systematic in its presentation, humanistic in style. It was to them that Henry IV entrusted the administration and teaching at the Collège founded by him in 1603 at La Flèche (fr); and from them Descartes, like his older contemporary Mersenne, would receive his primary and secondary instruction—in Latin, it should be noted, which was the language of scholarship throughout Europe.

Early years and schooling (1596–1618)

Descartes was the fifth child of Joachim Descartes (1563–1640) and Jeanne Brochard (ca. 1566–1597). Joachim, though descended from a distinguished line of physicians, took a degree in law and served as counselor to the Parlement of Bretagne (Brittany); many of Jeanne's family were in government service. Descartes’ was therefore a privileged background. It is not surprising that he would himself take a law degree or study medicine. Thirteen months after Descartes’ birth on 31 March 1596, his mother died shortly after giving birth to a male child who himself died three days after that.

At Easter in 1606, Descartes was sent to the Collège Henri IV at La Flèche. His older brother Pierre had already been there for two years. The rector of the school, Father Charlet, was a distant relative (Watson 2002:44). Forty years later Descartes addressed him as “you who had the role of a father through all my younger years” (9 February 1645; AT 5:156). Descartes says later that at La Flèche all students were treated almost the same regardless of status, and there is not much reason to think that Descartes received any privileges.

The curriculum at La Flèche, as at most schools in the period, began with Latin grammar, adding Greek in later grades. The pupils were steeped in the classics of ancient literature and, like their ancient counterparts, learned rhetoric and poetics; in the later grades, they learned philosophy and elementary mathematics. The curriculum of the last three years was devoted to logic, ethics, natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics, all based on Aristotle, but with significant departures and additions that had accreted in the four centuries since the Aristotelian corpus, reintroduced into Europe in the late 12th century, became the basis of secondary education. Defenders of Aristotle though they might be, the Jesuits were attuned to developments in natural philosophy, and especially to new experiments and observations. In 161?!?, for example, the professors and their students celebrated the discovery of the moons of Jupiter by Galileo.ªªª

After leaving La Flèche in 1616, Descartes went to the university in Poitiers, where his maternal uncle René Brochard II was living, to study law. He received his baccalaureate in November 1616, opening the way to a career like that of his father and brother. But his father’s position was destined for Descartes’ older brother; his father’s first son by his second wife stood to inherit a second position purchased by his father. The customary alternatives for a second son were the clergy or the army. Descartes joined a French regiment serving under Prince Maurice of Nassau, commander of the army of the newly independent United Provinces (now the Netherlands), a Protestant state that had defeated its Catholic Spanish rulers in 161?!?. The United Provinces had signed a twelve-year truce with Spain in 161, and its army was idle. Descartes saw no action. But he may have studied, while stationed at Breda, fortification and other military sciences. By the end of 1618, he had grown tired of idleness and uncouth companions, and in January 1619 he left to join the army of the Emperor Maximilian I.<rev>Letters</rev>

First scientific work and the Rules (1619–29)

At Breda, however, at the end of 1618, Descartes had the first significant intellectual encounter we have any record of. Isaac Beeckman’s Journal records his meeting with a young “Frenchman from Poitou” with whom he discussed mathematical and physical problems, and a new way of combining the two that Beeckman calls “physico-mathematics” (Gaukroger 1995:68–69). Descartes and Beeckman also shared in interest in music (i.e. the theory of proportions and scales). In December 1618 Descartes dedicated to his friend a Compendium musicæ (Treatise on music), and gave it to him as a New Year’s gift. Ten years later Descartes, upon hearing that Beeckman had presented Descartes’ ideas as his own and had claimed to be his teacher, would write a scathing letter of rebuke

Beeckman, largely self-taught in natural philosophy (his degree was in medicine), had already arrived at a corpuscularian mode of explanation and at a “law of inertia”, the first of three laws that he and Descartes would arrive at during their collaboration. Descartes wrote up his version of the laws over a decade later in The World, and published versions of them in the Principles, twenty-five years after his encounter with Beeckman. Together the two solved problems in mechanics and hydrostatics—among them the problem, solved earlier by Galileo, of determining the distance traversed by a freely falling body in a given time.

It was also at the end of 1618 that Descartes had his famous dreams, of which we have only an indirect report by his early biographer Adrien Baillet (Baillet ?!?].

Upon leaving Breda, Descartes, after wandering around a bit, travelled to Frankfurt, where he witnessed the coronation of Ferdinand, the new head of the Holy Roman Empire, Ulm, and perhaps Heidelberg. There, in the gardens of the Elector of the Palatine, he would have seen the grottos and fountains, designed by Salomon de Caus, to which he may be referring in the Treatise on man (Rodis-Lewis 1995:58; AT 10:215–216). In Ulm he met and exchanged ideas with the mathematician Johann Faulhaber, who was connected with the Rosicrucians. Already in notes dating from 1620, Descartes had written of a “remarkable discovery”, whose nature is unclear. He seems to have flirted briefly with notions found in the “livres curieuses” (“curious books”) he claims in the Discours to have read before or during this period (Discours 1, AT 6:?!?), before turning his attention to the mathematical and optical questions that preoccupied him as he was writing the Rules for the direction of the mind.

In 1622, Descartes returned to visit his family and then visited Paris, leaving for Italy where his biographers say that he travelled to Rome and Venice. In June of 1625 he was back in Poitiers. Having decisively turned away from the legal career still open to him, in July he went to Paris at the urging of his friends, where he met Mersenne, the writer Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac (also fr), and Jean Silhon, who in 1626 published Les Deux vérités, a defense of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul—the two topics that would figure in the subtitle of the Meditations. During this time also he worked with the physicist Claude Mydorge on the problem of determining the angle of refraction. Descartes’s solution, mentioned in the Rules, was published in the Dioptrique, one of the Essais of 1637.

It was during this period that Descartes worked on the Rules for the direction of the mind, parts of which may have been written as early as 1619. It was left incomplete when Descartes left for the Netherlands at the end of 1628. Near the end of his time in France, in November 1627, Descartes attended a lecture by the chemist Chandoux (who would be executed for forgery in 1631). Present at the lecture were the Papal Nuncio ªªª, Cardinal Bérulle, founder of French Oratorians, and Mersenne among others. Descartes praised Chandoux for rejecting Aristotle, but found Chandoux’s new principles only probable. In place of both he offered his own, “better established, more true, and more natural” not only than Chandoux’s but than any yet offered (to Villebressieu, summer 1631, AT 1:213).

Natural philosophy and the Discourse (1630–1639)

In July 1629 Descartes, who had not long before registered as a student at Franeker in Friesland, mentions a little treatise on metaphysics, which was supposed to have contained proof of the existence of God and the separability of the human soul from the body. To Mersenne he writes that he has a proof on the basis of which he knows that God exists “with more certainty than I know the truth of any proposition of Geometry” (AT 1:182; the claim is repeated in the Conversation with Burman, AT 5:178). It is likely that the proof was a version of the ontological proof later published in Meditations 5 and the first book of the Principles (Gaukroger 1995:198).

In the same letters to Mersenne that mention the little treatise, Descartes puts forward a doctrine now commonly known as “the creation of the eternal truths”. ªªª The doctrine is alluded to in Meditations 5, where Descartes attributes to the ideas of mathematics, as to the idea of God, a nature independent of our manner of thinking of them.

In 1630–1633, Descartes devoted himself to mathematics and natural philosophy. In June 1630 Descartes registered as a student at the University of Leiden, where it is likely he saw human dissections at the celebrated anatomical theatre. Late in 1631, Jacobus Golius, professor of mathematics and Arabic at Leiden, sent to various mathematicians a problem posed by the ancient geometer Pappus, who remarked that the general version of the problem could not be solved. By introducing what we would call affine coordinates, and drawing on his expertise in the algebra of Vieta and Faulhaber, Descartes reduces the problem to an algebraic problem. His method, published later in the Geometry, made possible the solution of a host of problems hitherto resistant to the purely geometrical methods of the ancients.

In the latter half of 1629, Descartes, starting from a question about parhelia (sun dogs), undertook to explain a host of meteorological phenomena; by the end of the year he had decided to explain “the whole of physics” (To Mersenne 13 Nov 1629, AT 1:70). The result was a corpuscularian physics, based on three laws of motion, the first of which was the law of inertia put forward earlier by Beeckman. In The World (also known as the Treatise on light), which was published only after Descartes' death, Descartes carries out his program, conceiving of matter only as extension, appealing only to efficient causes, and deriving—in principal—all natural phenomena from the laws of motion and hypotheses about the shapes and motions of particles.

During these years Descartes not only witnessed dissections but performed them himself, on carcasses acquired from local butchers; he also performed experiments on live animals. The Treatise on man, drawing on Descartes’ own observations but also on ancient and Renaissance sources, attempts to do for physiology what The World had done for cosmology and meteorology.

The pineal gland. From Descartes, Treatise on man, 1661.

Describing the body as a machine or automaton, it explains mechanistically the phenomena that in Aristotelian psychology had been ascribed to the inferior parts of the soul: the vegetative part, which included the powers of generation (reproduction), growth, and nutrition; and the sensitive part, which included the five outer senses, memory, imagination, appetite, and the power of locomotion. Accepting Harvey’s recently published theory of the circulation of the blood, he disagrees with Harvey on the cause of the pulse, and attempted to find a mechanistic explanation for what Harvey had attributed to a power or vis of the heart muscle.

In 1633, Descartes, having learned of the condemnation of Galileo, and knowing that to publish the Copernican cosmology of The World would now violate the expressed view of the Holy Office, put his work on natural philosophy aside, refusing thereafter to publish it. Instead, in 1635–1636 he reworked material on optics, geometry, and meteorological phenomena into three Essays, which he described as “samples of my method” (To Mersenne ?!?). To accompany the Essays, Descartes wrote the Discourse on method, which in addition to a truncated version of the rules devised in the 1620s included an intellectual autobiography, a “provisional morality”, a sketch of his physiology and physics (omitting his Copernican views), and a request that his researches be funded by the state. Written in the vernacular rather than in Latin, the Discourse was intended to be accessible even to women and Turks (that is, to people who did not ordinarily learn Latin).

Most notably, the Discourse included in its fourth part the arguments for the existence of God, the distinction of mind and body, and the resolution of doubt that would be presented more fully in the Meditations. In letters to Mersenne, Descartes says that he did not present the entire argument for fear that his less well-prepared readers might be led astray (To Mersenne ?!?). It is in the Discourse—or rather in a Latin translation of it made in the 1640s—and not in the Meditations that the phrase cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”) appears. The Discourse also includes, in its presentation of the body-machine, a criterion by which to discern those machines that have souls joined with them from those that don’t: if the creature before us can respond appropriately in a wide variety of situations, and if in particular it can respond to language, then it is not only a machine but a machine that has the power of reason, and therefore a soul like ours. Turing’s test may be regarded as an updated version of Descartes’. Like Turing’s, Descartes’ test does not of itself prove that the mind is distinct from the body; that a thing which has the power of reason cannot be a body is a separate question.

In 1635 Descartes’ daughter Francine was born, the result of a relationship with a serving maid, Hélène, at a house he was staying in. He acknowledged paternity of Francine, but the relationship was kept secret even from close friends like Constantijn Huygens. In a letter of 1637 to an unknown addressee, Descartes asks that his “niece” and Hélène should arrive as soon as possible (AT ?!?); this is the only reference to either of them in Descartes’ correspondence. Descartes’ biographer Baillet says that he planned to send Francine to France for her education. But in September 1640 Francine died; Baillet reports Descartes as saying that this was “the greatest sorrow he had ever experienced in his life” (check quoteªªª).

In the period from 1637 to early 1640 Descartes, through the intermediary of Mersenne, engaged in scientific controversy with Hobbes and Fermat. He also corresponded with critics of the Discourse, the response to which seems to have disappointed him. Among his more persistent critics was Jean-Baptiste Morin, author of a book on the existence of God and later of works on astrology. Morin, arguing from an Aristotelian point of view, takes issue with Descartes’ theory of light, with his corpuscularian physics, and with his method. ªªª In letters to a more sympathetic correspondent, Pierre Petit, an engineer and astronomer, Descartes defends his claim that animals are machines, a claim that continued to spark controversy between Cartesians and their opponents well into the eighteenth century.

The Meditations, the Principles (1640–47)

In February 1640, Descartes tells Mersenne that he will be working until Easter on a new presentation of his philosophy, one that will provide foundations for his physics while at the same time undermining those of Aristotelian physics. The resulting manuscript was circulated by Mersenne to members of his circle in Paris, including Hobbes, Gassendi, and Arnauld; it was also sent to a Dutch theologian, Johannes Caterus. Descartes’ intention was to elicit in advance of publication a set of objections to which he could respond. Six sets of objections and replies were published in the first edition of the Meditations in 1640; the second edition included a seventh set of objections written by a Jesuit, Pierre Bourdin. Controversy with Bourdin, whom he took to be responding on behalf of the entire company of Jesuits, left Descartes with a certain apprehension about them, expressed more than once in his letters.

Not only did the circulation of the Meditations before publication assure Descartes of a better response than he had received to the Discourse, it also enabled him to clarify and elaborate on key points in the argument. In the first replies to Caterus, for example, Descartes expands on the notion of God as causa sui (“cause of himself”), which would later play a role in Spinoza’s thought. In the fourth replies to Arnauld, he develops the argument for the mind-body distinction, and makes an attempt—an unfortunate one, as it turned out—to show how transubstantiation could be conceived within his new physics; and in the sixth replies to Mersenne and others, he puts forward an analysis of the three “degrees” of sensation. In the lengthy give-and-take in the fifth replies between “flesh” (Gassendi) and “mind” (Descartes), Gassendi’s largely empiricist theory of knowledge is set against the innatist apriorism of Descartes. Gassendi holds, for instance, that the concepts and truths of mathematics are known to us by abstraction from sensory experience; Descartes that on the contrary those concepts and truths are known independently of experience. Gassendi published a reply to Descartes’ replies, to which Descartes responded, not very politely, in the Letter to Dinet. The controversy led to an estrangement between them which lasted until Descartes’ last visit to Paris in 1647.

In 1641–1643 Descartes was embroiled, at first through the intermediary of Henricus Regius, at that point his protégé, and then in his own person, with Gisbert Voetius, a theologian and the pastor of the Reformed Church in Utrecht, and his colleague Martinus Schoock. Regius, a proponent of Cartesian views in natural philosophy and medicine, publicly defended a number of controversial theses. Descartes wrote several letters advising him on how to talk to his Aristotelian adversaries. The exchange grew acrimonious, so much so that the directors of the University of Utrecht tried to end it by forbidding both parties to engage in public debate. A few years later, after Regius had begun to take an independent course, Descartes criticized him in the Notes against a certain broadsheet (1647). As with Beeckman, an initially friendly, even close, collaboration ended in rejection on the part of Descartes.

In 1644 Descartes published the Principles of philosophy, a work at first intended to replace the Aristotelian textbooks used by the Jesuits. It became a comprehensive presentation of Descartes’ metaphysics and natural philosophy, excluding the material of the Treatise of man, some of which would be used in the Passions of the soul. The Principles was later translated into French under Descartes’ supervision, and published in 1647 with a letter-preface to Princess Elisabeth. In that letter, Descartes presents the “tree of knowledge”: metaphysics is its root, physics (that is, the natural philosophy of the Principles) is its trunk, and its three branches are the practical sciences of mechanics, medicine, and ethics.

Descartes returned to his researches in anatomy and physiology in the 1640s. The result was his Description of the human body, whose date of composition is most likely 1647 or 1648.ªªª In it Descartes develops a mechanistic account of reproduction; the Treatise on man had omitted that topic, instead simply presupposing the existence of animal-machines. The Description, like the Treatise, was published only after Descartes' death, first in Latin translation (1661) and then in the original French (166?!?).

In 1647, Descartes twice traveled from Egmond in North Holland to Paris. The first trip was to arrange for the French translation of the Principles and to recover interest owed to him by his brother Pierre on money paid for inherited properties that had been sold in ?!?. On his second trip Descartes met Hobbes at a dinner arranged by a young priest, César d’Estrées, for the purpose of reconciling Descartes with his old adversaries Hobbes and Gassendi. Gassendi was too ill to attend; but after dinner Descartes and Hobbes visited him; Descartes’ quarrel with Gassendi was finally laid to rest. Descartes also visited Pascal, who was also sick in bed, with whom he talked for several hours after a demonstration by the mathematician Roberval of Pascal’s calculating machine.<rev>Jacqueline Pascal, AT 5:72ªªª</rev> Descartes visited Pascal again the next day. Of this visit nothing is known, except that he offered medical advice.

In 1648 Descartes returned to Paris to collect a royal pension of 3,000 livres awarded to him by Cardinal Mazarin. He seems to have planned, uncharacteristically, to enter the life of the court, taking an apartment nearby. The state, however, was undergoing a financial crisis brought on by the luxurious habits and gift-giving of Queen Anne and Mazarin. On 17 February payment of interest on state obligations (including Descartes’ pension) was suspended. Richelieu’s dispute with the Parliament came to a head in August 1648, when, after the arrest of the president and two other counselors, the people of Paris took to the barricades. The revolt was known as the Fronde, from the word for the slings used by gangs of youth in street battles. Descartes, who could have been implicated in a conspiracy against Richelieu through his connection with the Duy de Luynes, translator of the Meditations, left Paris on 27 August. The threat of civil war was defused the next day, when Richelieu gave in to the Parliament and released the prisoners. But Descartes did not return. In letters of the period he said that he “seemed to have gone to Paris merely to buy a parchment, the most expensive and useless that I have ever held in my hands” (31 Mar 1649, AT 5:?!?; Watson 2002:266–268).

The Passions; last days (1648–50)

In September 1649 Descartes left for Stockholm. He had, through the intermediary of Pierre Chanut, the French ambassador to Sweden, been invited by Queen Christina in March. Christina was an avid reader; she had had Chanut and her librarian Johannes Freinshemsius explain the contents of the Meditations and the Principles to her, and now she wanted to Descartes himself to explain them to her. He had already corresponded with her through Chanut, answering questions on the sovereign good (To Chanut ?!?); he even sent her letters he had sent to Elisabeth. It is likely that among his motives for going to Sweden, along with his disillusionment and chagrin at what had happened to him in Paris, was lack of funds (Watson 2002:289–290).

Descartes arrived in Stockholm in October. Almost immediately, he expressed regret about his decision, as the long winter began, one of the worst, as it turned out, of the seventeenth century. Three months later, the Queen had seen him only a few times, and had asked of him only that he draw up statutes for a Swedish Royal Academy. This he did, submitting them on 1 February. The next day he caught cold; on 3 February he was stricken with fever; and on 11 February between three and four o’clock in the morning, he died.

His estate, other than his papers and personal goods, amounted to 200 rischedales, a modest amount, half of which went to his servant and half to pay his funeral expenses. According to his niece Catherine, and a contemporary, Samuel de Sorbière, Descartes dictated, a few hours before his death, a letter asking his brother and half-brother to continue a small pension being paid to his nurse. The last words attributed to him by his literary executor Claude Clerselier and his biographer Baillet, neither of whom was present, are in all likelihood apocryphal.

References

Works of Descartes

Collected editions

Adam, Charles (?!?). Œuvres de Descartes. Paris: Vrin. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) (This is the standard edition, usually cited as ‘AT’.)

Alquié, Ferdinand (?!?). Œuvres de Descartes. Paris. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help); Unknown parameter |Publisher= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help)

Biographies

Baillet, Adrien (?!?). Vie de Monsieur Descartes. ?!?: ?!?. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help) (The earliest biography regarded as having documentary value. It is, however, a defense of Descartes; Baillet’s claims, where they are not corroborated by other sources, should be treated with caution.)

Gaukroger, Stephen (1995). Descartes: an intellectual biography. Oxford: Clarendon. (Includes a detailed treatment of Descartes’ natural philosophy.)

Rodis-Lewis, Geneviève (1995). Descartes. Paris: Calmann-Lévy. (Eng. trans. Jane Marie Todd, Descartes. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1998. (A sympathetic summation by the doyenne of Descartes studies in France.)

Watson, Richard A (2002). Cogito, ergo sum: the life of René Descartes. Boston: David Godine. (Firmly sets Descartes in his place and time.)

Other works

Gouhier, Henri (1958). Les premères pensées de Descartes. Paris: ?!?.